Finding consensus for change in Saratoga

Joe O'Hara only has to look out his office window to see evidence of what ails Saratoga Springs.

A clock--ornate, with turn-of-the-century styling--stands there on the lawn, next to the building he has restored at the corner of Circular and Phila streets. But it took O'Hara a year to get the necessary approvals for the clock, which had been classified by the municipality as an accessory structure, setting in motion a series of reviews by several city departments and panels.

"We have a process that's discouraging to a developer," O'Hara says. "If I structured my business like the city, I couldn't get anything done."

But O'Hara isn't only a man with a gripe; he's also a man with a plan: to bring a more business-like model to city government. And he's a man with the credentials to be taken seriously: nearly three decades of work with governments at all levels--as a consultant on the outside and as an administrator on the inside--and a dozen years in the Spa City as a businessman, real estate developer and owner of minor league sports franchises.

Although Saratoga Springs' form of government is unique--it is led by a mayor and four department heads elected by the voters, and these five representatives form the City Council--O'Hara wouldn't abandon this so-called commission structure. Rather, he would "re-juggle the boxes" in the framework, since "the boxes we have aren't lined up with modern government."

Missing from the picture, in O'Hara's view, is a department of economic development and an elected commissioner who would sit on the council. The format of a five-member council could be maintained if the posts of commissioner of accounts and commissioner of finance--separate financial departments responsible for revenue and disbursement--were combined in a department of administration and finance. "Is economic development one of the top five activities in the city?" O'Hara asks. If so, then, "I'd much rather have a commissioner of economic development and combine those two [commissioner of accounts and commissioner of finance]."

O'Hara also would realign responsibilities in the surviving departments: public safety, for instance, would focus solely on police and fire protection, rather than also worrying about building inspection, code enforcement and vital statistics. And the new department of economic development would bring together into a one-stop shop far-flung planning and development functions that now result in proposals being "ping-ponged" among various offices.

"Any system that has you running to three out of five departments for a project is not efficient," O'Hara says.

Such delay also can be deadly, especially in today's highly competitive environment. If a developer weighing Wilton, Malta, Clifton Park and Saratoga Springs for a project discovers it could take six months to get a building permit in the Spa City, "you're starting off 10 yards behind" the competition for the resulting jobs, O'Hara says.

"Economic development is the most critical issue in Saratoga Springs' future," he adds. The city no longer can rely on the cachet of being "The Summer Place to Be," nor can it afford to say, "We're Saratoga Springs; we don't have to worry about economic development," O'Hara says. Scratch the surface and find a slow-growing economy in the city, and an average annual tax increase close to 10 percent.

But is O'Hara the right agent for change? A two-year member of the city planning board, he resigned in October after getting caught in the maelstrom over whether the city planner's post should be reduced to part-time. (O'Hara says a meeting of developers who regularly get together was misrepresented as the group plotting to demote the planner--with him as ringleader. Rather than fight the perception, though, he stepped down from the board.)

"I'm comfortable with shaking things up," O'Hara says. Of his plan for remaking government, he adds, "I haven't found anyone who's said this won't work and why."

But O'Hara cares less about the particular form of restructuring than that it result in creation of a department of economic development.

"I don't care if people don't want [his model], but at least let's debate," says O'Hara, who vows to promote that discussion between now and the next City Council election in 1999.